I came across Microsoft Education labs recently when there was a flurry of tweets surrounding a Moodle extension for Microsoft Office 2007 and 2010.  Not running Moodle at my current school (we have gone for Edmodo) I wasn’t very interested but decided to poke further into Microsoft’s Education labs.  I had been aware of the Office Labs group for a while through which I downloaded the excellent Ribbon Hero game and pptPlex – a very useful tool for changing how PPT works.

I was quite impressed with the offerings I found especially the Flashcard site.  Apart from the Moodle offerings there is also a Chemistry Add-in for Word and a Maths worksheet generator.  Hopefully after sending those links to the relevant staff at my school I will be able to get some feedback from them and post my feelings.

The Flashcard tool is a fully featured website.  Obviously as these tools are very much in beta at the moment and so the site can be quite unstable at times.  However if this site does start to become more stable and more and more features are added I think it could become immensely beneficial for students.

Contents

First Accessing the site

When you arrive at the site you will see a selection of popular Flashcard decks and an empty deck titled ‘Your decks – Create deck’ as well as various options across the top.  Straight away I would recommend signing in which uses Windows Live authentication.  Interestingly at our school students are blocked from the vast majority of Windows Live sites so that they can’t get access to Hotmail but they were able to sign in.

Signed in and Creating your first Deck

I’ll get to browsing other people’s decks later but for now lets focus on creating your first deck.  In the create interface you will need to provide:

• Title
• Description
• Categories (important for others to find your deck – more later)
• Whether to make the deck public or not (as I have yet to find a share option for an individual deck I would suggest leaving this ticked)
• Choose a font

Now you are ready to add your first question and answer.  Write the question on the left (add a sound or image if you want) and then answer on the right (with sound or image as well).  I have seen decks with 100 cards and more so carry on adding what you can in.

Once you are done click Finish and your deck is ready to be played.

Playing a Deck

When playing a deck you have three play options and some management options.

The management options allow you to:

• Favourite a deck (important for a student to track decks made by teachers and other students)
• Access a report (only appears for ‘Study’ and ‘Type it in’ play modes)

This produces a report on how you have progressed through the deck with a percentage of correct responses.  This could be used as an unusual testing system for some classes.

• Edit a deck (only if it is your own deck)
• View the website fullscreen
• Report Abuse

There are 3 play options:

•  
  1. Review
  2. Study
  3. Type it in

1. Review

Using this method the question and answer sides appear at the same time and the only controls are a forward and back.

2. Study

Only the question side is shown but a ‘flip card’ option is added to the bottom right hand corner.  Next to the question side is a tick and cross box.  The standard way students could use this is to answer the question themselves, flip the card and then mark whether they got the question right or wrong.  If they got the card right it goes into the good memory side of a line at the bottom.  If they mark it as got wrong then it goes back into the slide deck on the left.  Once you have seen all the cards once it brings up a message asking you to keep going now you have seen the cards once for another ten minutes.  This is presumably following a philosophy of how best to study using flashcards.

3. Type it in

This uses a similar layout to Study but instead of the tick and cross buttons and the flip card option you now have a textbox for typing in the answer.

I’m not sure about this method as you have to get the text exactly right before it marks you as correct.  If a teacher has written an answer in a particular way but a student answers it slightly differently (but still containing the right information) they will be marked wrong – which could prove frustrating.

Another issue I have with this method is if your answer slide contains an image.  Instead of dropping that card out of rotation for that deck it prevents you from using type it in for the entire deck.

Browsing and Favouriting

This is perhaps the best part of the site.  As it begins to grow and they begin to implement other features such as searching decks this will become even more useful.  For now as students search for decks made by other students or teachers they will have to stick with finding them based on the other users nickname.

Conclusion

I really like this site a lot.  Despite the lack of certain features one would take for granted on a Web 2.0 site nowadays it has immense potential.  On the plus side the ease of creation of flashcards and their ease of use mean it becomes very compelling for use in class.  I sat some 14 year olds in front of the site and they had created a number of decks with quite a few slides in them.  As mentioned already the lack of features is what is holding this site back right now but after hearing directly form the Educationlabs team recently I am positive they will begin to implement those soon.